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For the Auteur of Action, a Thoughtful Turn

JOHN WOO is arguably the most influential director making movies today. His Hong Kong films of the 1980's, including ''A Better Tomorrow'' and ''The Killer,'' established a hyperkinetic and hyperbolic new style in action filmmaking, founded on wild extremes of firepower, body counts, camera angles and cutting patterns.

Released in 1986, ''A Better Tomorrow'' gave new life to the Hong Kong martial arts movie by crossbreeding it with the American gangster film. The movie became an immense popular success in Asia (it has inspired three sequels), and when it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 1987, it turned Mr. Woo into an instant cult figure in the West.

Soon he was invited to Hollywood, where his films were already being imitated. Beginning with a modestly budgeted independent production, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle ''Hard Target,'' Mr. Woo quickly rose to big studio blockbusters like ''Face/Off'' with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage and ''Mission: Impossible 2'' with Tom Cruise.

Mr. Woo's signatures -- the slow-motion amplification of violence, the air thick with wood chips and shattered glass; the impossibly cool hero, who leaps and rolls through a battle with guns blazing in both hands; the intimate stand-offs between antagonists, their gun barrels pressed into each other's foreheads -- have been imitated by filmmakers as different as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg. From ''The Matrix'' to ''Spider-Man,'' it is hard to cite a major action film in recent years that hasn't incorporated Mr. Woo's attitudes and innovations.

His latest film, ''Windtalkers,'' will be released on Friday. It is a World War II tale of a Navajo Indian (played by Adam Beach) who is enlisted by the Army as a ''code talker,'' using his native language to pass messages the enemy can't interpret. Nicolas Cage is the Army sergeant assigned to protect him -- or kill him, should he be in danger of capture. With a passionate but potentially dangerous brotherly relationship at its core, it is probably the most personal of Mr. Woo's American films, and one that seems likely to open a new period in his career -- one more naturalistic, reflective and mature.

As one of the few Asian filmmakers to succeed in Hollywood, and certainly the most commercially successful, Mr. Woo, at 56, in some ways embodies the globalizing forces that have shaped motion pictures in the last two decades. The major American studios are continuing to gobble up local film industries; the once-thriving Hong Kong film business is in a severe slump, thanks to overwhelming American competition, and even India's seemingly invincible Bollywood cinema is wavering under the assault. Meanwhile, Hollywood absorbs and adapts the local characteristics it finds most useful.

Mr. Woo is himself a man of many cultures: he has found his material in storehouses both Eastern and Western, Confucian and Christian, popular and elite. (''John Woo'' is an Anglicization of his Chinese name, Yusen Wu.) His films combine the gangster tales of Hollywood with the sword play -- transformed into gun play -- of traditional Chinese opera. His work is staggeringly violent but often quite tender, sometimes to the point of sentimentality. His characters are bound together in diametrical oppositions that suggest the eternal conflict of yin and yang of Taoist tradition. A policeman (Danny Lee) comes to admire the professional hit man (Chow Yun Fat) he has been assigned to capture in ''The Killer'' (1989). An F.B.I. agent (John Travolta) and a terrorist (Nicolas Cage) trade faces and identities in ''Face/Off'' (1997). At the same time, his films reflect a Christian yearning for transcendence and grace, of death as the gateway to salvation.

''My grandfather was a landlord in China, in the province next to Canton called Guangxi,'' Mr. Woo said during a recent visit to New York. ''He owned a farm and lots of houses, and my father was his youngest son, of nine.''

''My father was different from the rest of the family,'' Mr. Woo said. ''He was pretty intellectual -- a scholar who liked literature and painting. He left home when he was 16 years old to become a teacher in a high school. All he was looking for was a real life, something noble.'' In the course of his education, Mr. Woo's father converted, becoming a member of the Chinese Christian Church.

During World War II, Mr. Woo's father joined the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek. ''He was so loyal,'' Mr. Woo remembered. ''That's what I learned from him. As a real man, he was loyal to everything -- loyal to yourself and loyal to your country and loyal to your family and friends.''

Like that of Martin Scorsese, one of Mr. Woo's idols, his childhood was marked by a serious illness. ''I was born after the war, in 1946,'' Mr. Woo said. ''And unfortunately, when I was 3 years old, I had some kind of disease. My back was all rotten and bleeding, from some kind of infection.

''A Chinese doctor said to my father: 'Your child has no chance to live.' But my father didn't give up. He spent all his money looking for good doctors. At last, fortunately, he found a young doctor who had studied in Germany, and who had come back to China. He used the Western way to cure me. So the doctor saved my life, and my father saved my life.''

FATHER figures are very important in Mr. Woo's work, but they are more conspicuous by their absence than by their presence. The films often present a rudderless family weakened by the absence of an authority figure. Two brothers, one a cop (Leslie Cheung) and one a criminal (Ti Lung), are pitted against each other in ''A Better Tomorrow,'' when their father is killed in a gang war. The senior gang lords and police inspectors who often function as moral centers in Hong Kong films are often revealed to be weak or corrupt, leaving Mr. Woo's young protagonists to fend for themselves, often with bloody results.

The need for protection, the search for a safe harbor, remains a constant undercurrent in Mr. Woo's work. In ''Hard-Boiled'' (1992), Mr. Woo's last Hong Kong feature, the cynical cop played by Chow Yun Fat finds his refuge in a smoky jazz bar managed by Mr. Woo himself, appearing in a cameo; the film ends in an extravagant shoot-out in the children's ward of a hospital, which finds Mr. Chow cradling an infant in his arms as he blasts away at an army of attackers.

The attackers, too, were inspired by real life. After the Communists took over China, Mr. Woo's family planned to move to Taiwan but was forced to go to Hong Kong instead, where it settled into a shantytown crowded with refugees from the mainland. When the area, called Shak Kip Mei, was devastated by a fire in 1954, the family lost all of its belongings, including identity papers. Mr. Woo's father soon contracted tuberculosis, leaving his mother to support their family of five, pounding rocks, sewing or selling food on the street.

''The place we lived in was pretty awful,'' Mr. Woo said, ''with a lot of street gangs, drug dealers, gamblers, prostitutes. I had to deal with a gang almost every day. Whenever I turned a corner, I knew I would get ambushed. So when I woke up, the first thing was to grab something as a weapon to try to protect myself -- a piece of brick or a baseball bat. Then if I got ambushed, I could fight back. I was bleeding all the time, and my head still has some scars.''

The young Mr. Woo eventually found his sanctuaries. ''One was the movie theater, and the other one was the church,'' he said. ''Whenever I got beat up or whenever I had any bad thing happen to me, I always liked to go to the church or the theater to find my dream.

''My father never liked movies -- he liked literature, painting, real life. But my mother was a big fan of the movies. She used to bring me to the theater without my father knowing.''

''She liked the Chinese movies, but she was also a big fan of Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis and Judy Garland,'' Mr. Woo recalled. ''I was deeply in love with the musical, especially with 'The Wizard of Oz,' 'Singin' in the Rain' and quite a lot of Fred Astaire's films. When I watched a musical, it gave me a lot of hope. The people were so beautiful. Everyone is so kind to each other and everybody loved each other. They made me believe even though the world was so ugly, there are always some nice people. So that gave me a lot of happiness.''

Somewhere between the violence that the young Mr. Woo was experiencing in the streets, and the artistic tranquillity he was absorbing at the movies, a director's style was born. The complex choreography of the action sequences in Mr. Woo's films owes a clear debt to the Hollywood musical, with its integration of rhythm, movement and color. But these sequences also contain an authentic anger and aggression, their unfettered extremes reflecting the pent-up resentment of a powerless child. Mr. Woo's work continues to exist in a space between order and chaos, between the controlled stylization of a fantasy world and the fear and pain of an uncontrollable reality.

Christian imagery continues to surface in Mr. Woo's work, often in disconcerting contexts -- the flights of white doves that punctuate many of his action sequences, or the machine-gun battle in a church that concludes ''The Killer'' (1989), with its indelible image of an exploding statue of the Virgin Mary.

Thanks to the financial help of an American family -- Mr. Woo remembers their name as Knight and believes they lived in California -- he was able to attend a school operated by the Lutheran Church. ''In high school, I already wanted to learn to make movies, but my first dream was to be a minister, because I got so much help from the church,'' he said. ''But when I approached the missionary school, they didn't accept me because they found I was too artistic.''

Mr. Woo's formal education came to an end at 16, when his father died. But he continued his film studies informally, attending movies imported from Europe as well as Chinese and American fare. ''We got so much influence from the French New Wave, especially Truffaut and Godard,'' he said. ''I was also fond of Jean-Pierre Melville's films.'' Mr. Woo was referring to the director of such stylized gangster films as ''Bob le Flambeur'' '' as well as Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa.''

Among the few Chinese filmmakers Mr. Woo admired was Chang Cheh, who had pumped new life into the moribund martial arts genre in the 1970's with films like ''Five Deadly Venoms'' (1978) and ''The Magnificent Ruffians'' (1979). ''At that time, he was the equal of Kurosawa in Hong Kong,'' Mr. Woo said. ''A friend of mine was a scriptwriter, and he introduced me to Chang Cheh. I worked for him as an assistant director for one and a half years. He is my mentor, you know.''

Mr. Woo finally got his chance to direct in 1973 when a friend formed a small production company. ''My friend got the money but he didn't know how to direct. So he invited me to be co-director. At that time, I was pretty poor. So I would sleep in my friend's office. I was so happy. We got a script and we hired a cast. And the movie was called 'Farewell Buddy.' '' (Credited as ''action choreographer'' was a young Jackie Chan.)

Though ''Farewell Buddy'' was banned at first because of its violence, it attracted the attention of Leonard Ho, the co-founder of the upstart Hong Kong movie company Golden Harvest. Mr. Woo joined the staff, where he directed at least a dozen period adventures and slapstick comedies that have since circulated under a bewildering variety of titles. (Some of the movies are ''From Riches to Rags,'' ''Last Hurrah for Chivalry'' and ''Plain Jane to the Rescue.'') But even in something like ''Countdown in Kung Fu'' (1975), Mr. Woo's hand can be seen in the theme -- three martial arts students band together to avenge the killing of their fatherly teacher -- and in the choreographed precision of the sword fights. From the beginning, Mr. Woo's carefully framed shots and imaginatively edited sequences displayed a technical flair far beyond the lazy zooms typical of the kung fu pictures of the period.

It was with ''A Better Tomorrow'' in 1986 that the pieces came together for Mr. Woo. A remake of Lung Kong's 1967 film ''The Story of a Discharged Prisoner,'' ''A Better Tomorrow'' transposed the balletic violence of the martial arts genre onto the framework of a Hollywood gangster film. For the first time, Mr. Woo's contemporary characters crossed gun barrels just as his kung fu protagonists had crossed swords, staring each other down, waiting for the first move. One of the classic kung fu moves, the flying kick, became in Mr. Woo's hands a leap with guns blazing. The exuberant athleticism of the Chinese opera met the bright, new world of automatic weaponry, and the result was a spectacle of sound and fury unlike anything the movies had seen before.

IT was the spectacle that intrigued American producers, and not the considerable moral substance that lies behind Mr. Woo's extravagant plots. After finishing up his Hong Kong career with the highly personal 1990 ''Bullet in the Head'' -- a saga of three boyhood friends who become gangsters in Vietnam -- and the more frankly commercial ''Once a Thief'' (1991) and ''Hard-Boiled,'' Mr. Woo left for the United States. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

In much of his American work, Mr. Woo has seemed more concerned with satisfying expectations -- with putting his trademarks on display, and giving his audiences their money's worth -- than he has with exploring new directions, or trying to grow as an artist.

''Windtalkers,'' however, is another departure. The violence is there, but it takes a back seat to the characters. Mr. Cage's distrustful sergeant and Mr. Beach's naïve private develop a relationship that follows Mr. Woo's usual operatic pattern of loyalty and betrayal, but it does so with a sense of nuance and a conciseness of gesture that is new to his work. Mr. Woo seems less eager to impress with his technical prowess and more comfortable expressing his themes through suggestion and understatement. The stylized, fantasy violence of the earlier films has been reined in, giving the film a real-world heft and plausibility that Mr. Woo's previous work has declined. Though hardly minimalist, ''Windtalkers'' represents a new level of refinement and suggests that Mr. Woo's career, already one of the most fertile in contemporary film, has yet to produce its last surprise.

The Essential Woo

A BETTER TOMORROW -- (1986) After more than a dozen apprentice films, the director John Woo came into his own with this grandly stylized gangster epic.

Correction: June 16, 2002, Sunday An article last Sunday about the director John Woo misidentified the branch of the United States military portrayed in his new film, ''Windtalkers,'' which is set in World War II. It is the Marines, not the Army.